Posted
by
BeauHDon Wednesday December 06, 2017 @08:10PM
from the repeating-the-lie dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: One popular claim by the telecom sector is that net neutrality rules are somehow preventing people who are sick or disabled from gaining access to essential medical services they need to survive. Verizon, for example, has been trying to argue since at least 2014 that the FCC's net neutrality rules' ban on paid prioritization (which prevents ISPs from letting deep-pocketed content companies buy their way to a distinct network performance advantage over smaller competitors) harms the hearing impaired. That's much to the chagrin of groups that actually represent those constituents, who have consistently and repeatedly stated that this claim simply isn't true. Comcast lobbyists have also repeated this patently-false claim in their attempt to lift the FCC ban on unfair paid prioritization deals.

The claim that net neutrality rules hurt the sick also popped up in a recent facts-optional fact sheet the agency has been circulating to try and justify the agency's Orwellian-named "Restoring Internet Freedom" net neutrality repeal. In the FCC's current rules, the FCC was careful to distinguish between "Broadband Internet Access Services (BIAS)," which is general internet traffic like browsing, e-mail or app data and "Non-BIAS data services," which are often given prioritized, isolated capacity to ensure lower latency, better speed, and greater reliability. VoIP services, pacemakers, energy meters and all telemedicine applications fall under this category and are exempt from the rules. Despite the fact that the FCC's net neutrality rules clearly exempt medical services from the ban on uncompetitive paid prioritization, FCC boss Ajit Pai has consistently tried to claim otherwise. He did so again last week during a speech in which he attempted to defend his agency from the massive backlash to its assault on net neutrality. "By ending the outright ban on paid prioritization, we hope to make it easier for consumers to benefit from services that need prioritization -- such as latency-sensitive telemedicine," Pai said. "By replacing an outright ban with a robust transparency requirement and FTC-led consumer protection, we will enable these services to come into being and help seniors."

It is fascinating what utterly despicable failed human beings make it to the top in the west today. Having people with zero honor and zero personal morals in charge used to be a privilege of the developing world. Not anymore.

He's got to try to justify something he's doing which goes so far against the goals he claims he's trying to support and the mandate of FCC or his transparent attempt at a payday once leaving the FCC would be even more obvious.

Pai doesn't give two shits about the internet, the FCC's mandate or the public, he's simply trying to guarantee his own payday once he leaves the FCC. With 80+% of the comments on his net neutrality rollback against the action and his blatant disregard of this it's obvious he doesn't care at all what the public thinks or the mandate congress gave the FCC. The FCC actually refused to even address any comment that wasn't written by a lawyer and referenced specific laws, which was actually in violation of federal public comment rules.

Heard another Commissioner discuss how giving the FTC authority was better than the FCC.
Lying bastards. Destruction of the net is both their priority and the worst thing that could happen.
Oh, Trump voters... people who may have had to rely on the WWW for your deplorable opinions...does this one bother you ?

Pretty much anything... just not Hillary. Drain the swamp? Fuck it, don't care anymore. Tax breaks for the middle class... fuck it, just no Hillary. Child molesters in Congress... fuck it, as long as it ain't Hillary. Emails!!! Grab 'em by the pussy! WW3? Who cares... just not Hillary.

Please show me exactly what part of the constitution says cops shouldn't uphold the law whenever that happens to involve illegal immigrants?"illegal" clearly means something like "whatever I happen to feel is right" to you nonsensical snowflake liberals.

I don;t mind that someone has different opinions, actually I welcome the debate. What I find amusing is someone pretending to be a big man and sniping personal attacks, but actually not having enough balls to even use their actual username.

The reason they want to give FTC authority is precisely because the FTC has no teeth. The entire point of this is because Steve Bannon and other anti-government types managed to get Trump to approve their anti-government wishlist for political appointees. We've got an education secretary that doesn't believe in public schools, a secretary of state that has laid off enough diplomats that we have no more diplomatic power, a secretary of the treasury who wants to repeal Dodd-Frank and other safeguards added

Actually it has been a front page story on CNN, NSNBC, others.
It doesn't help that hardly anyone actually reads the real news now.
There has been tons of outrage. It's falling on deaf ears.
This is the era of Trump. Public opinion doesn't matter. Truth doesn't matter.
It's an agenda.
The only hope is that it will be reversed, as soon as possible.

There has been tons of outrage. It's falling on deaf ears.
This is the era of Trump. Public opinion doesn't matter. Truth doesn't matter.
It's an agenda.

I agree. It is eerily reminiscent of the era of Obama. I remember things like "if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor" and "the average American family will save $2500 per year in healthcare costs" and "you will have more and better choices for healthcare under the Affordable Care Act" and "we will cover more people with better coverage and it will cost less".

It turns out that every single one of those things was false, that millions of Americans were outr

It turns out that every single one of those things was false, that millions of Americans were outraged at the effort to have government take over healthcare and that outrage fell on deaf ears. Remember the legislative chicanery to get the ACA rammed through the Senate before Senator Ted Kennedy's replacement, Republican Scott Brown, could be seated?

Sheesh. And liberals are upset when the Republicans do things along party lines without Democratic support.

All I gotta say is the old proverb: Two wrong do not make a right.

We're not each others enemies, but goddamn it sure feels like the 'right' is at war with the 'left.' This is the kind of tit-for-tat thinking you expect of two sovereign powers that don't like each other.

The left sees people as a metallurgist sees iron ore. To them, people in the way of their vision are impurities to be removed before forging their utopia.

That's not how I see people. I'm definitely mostly liberal and progressive. I don't see the right as enemies or lumps of iron ore. I just see them as uneducated stupidity. There's nothing inherently wrong with being uneducated and stupid. But when the right imposes it's stupid upon me, I get a little annoyed. I don't like being told what I can and cannot do. The right seems to like to do that. Left seems to say, let people do what they want, leave people alone. So it's hard for me to sympathize wit

It has been well-known that the USA is not a civilized country since the reign of Bu$hitler the Tyrant. Well on over 15 years now. So why this "except the US" statement, when the US long ago fell out of the ranks of civilized nations? It's a third world shithole and has been for quite some time. I'm kind of puzzled.

I kept my doctor. I see no death panels. The issue was debated ad-nausium. I would have liked to see the ACA go much further, but the GOP wasn't open to anything that might cut the insurance companies out of the picture, or even weaken their position.

Meanwhile, the GOP has wasted many MONTHS since Trump came into office trying to come up with something better and have failed time after time. You can't blame the Dems, the Rs control House, Senate, and the Oval office. The only 'solutions' they could come up with were so vile that even parts of the GOP couldn't hold their noses hard enough to pass it.

Now they're trying so hard to pull a fast one with the tax bill they totally forgot to renew the Patriot (traitor) act.

But look out! Something truly despicable must be brewing in D.C. since Trump needlessly dumped a 55 gallon drum of gasoline on the dumpster fire that is Israeli-Palestinian relations as a diversion.

You are joking. Insurance companies go through unseemly effort to deny care. They have adapted the practice of demanding pre-aproval for just about anything that may cost money, but not publishing (in advance) which treatments need pre-aproval and which do not. The effect is to delay care. And delaying care in a situatoin in which you pay for coverage per unit of covered time, is equivalent to denying care.

They exist because insurance companies are forced to pay for care that most people don't need but still are forced to pay for. So they cannot afford to provide the care that people do need and do pay for. When the law restricts insurance companies in what they can charge and puts mandates on what care they must provide, the insurance companies cannot physically provide everything implied in the contracts they write. So they get into the position where they are forced to look for way to cut care. And sin

You apparently don't remember pre-ACA insurance. It included such gems as rescission a process where they decide after an expensive medical event that your coverage was terminated the day before. Or somehow an expensive medication was declared to be "experimental" for (non)-coverage purposes.

You may also have missed the way the industry as a whole colluded to insist that uninsured patients get charged far more than insured patients.That continues today.

It included such gems as rescission a process where they decide after an expensive medical event that your coverage was terminated the day before. Or somehow an expensive medication was declared to be "experimental" for (non)-coverage purposes.

Those were (a) rare cases, (b) something you could litigate in court. Because of ACA, you can't take insurance companies to court nearly as readily.

Finally, health insurers are making record profits this year.

So? ACA caps their profits at 20% of revenue. If their operating profits are growing that just means that their expenses are growing, too. Otherwise, they would not be able to collect higher premiums (and they have been). If their investments are growing, however, it has nothing to do with how they operate (stock market had quite a run, so the

There was nothing rare about rescission. It was common enough that they had software specifically to flag likely expensive patients for dpecial review. They specifically created their applications to make sure they would always have the proverbial 6 lines written by an honest man.

Record profits means only a fool would take their crying about ruinous regulations seriously. They can't be all that ruinous if they're prospering so well.

Now, keep in mind, I would have preferred to cut insurance out of the pic

Record profits means only a fool would take their crying about ruinous regulations seriously.

No, it doesn't. If the profits come from investment income rather than operating income, then regulation is forcing them to cut down costs whether you like or not. They just happen to have an incidental windfall from the rising stock market. The moment it turns south, the investment income will drop to zero or even negative (depending on how good their hedging and risk management is). The law already prohibits them from paying out less than 80% of the money they take in. So rising values of those 20% w

Oh, and just so I am clear, it is my firm opinion that if no one goes to jail for this travesty of justice called Obamacare, than it will be the miscarriage of justice that this country will be most remembered for. Obamacare is a bigger injustice than slavery was. Having an immoral system (like slavery) because no better system has been devised is only tragic. Having a working system and destroying it deliberately is wicked and repugnant.

So now any sort of rationing is a death panel? We have always had rationing. We can do it on the basis of wealth (rich get manicures while they wait, poor die of treatable illnesses), need (people who might die go first, boo-boos get fixed at home with a band-aid), or?

You do know that nothing says socialized medicine forbids you from paying cash in a private transaction, right? Even then, you benefit since the private care will consider that you will eventually be treated at no additional cost and so will o

The system wasn't working though. It still isn't working all that well, because ACA didn't go nearly far enough. There are several examples around the world of systems that work better based on objective criteria. We should adopt one of them.

Reducing costs is no way to increase care. Romney's plan (when he ran for President) was to create a lower tier of doctors for lower tier of care. Some states already allow RN's to act as partial doctors (including writing prescriptions). Introducing a nation system for RN licensing would increase the number of providers. Allowing RN's do the basic care while requiring MD to do specialist care would have been enough to increase the pool of providers. Instead of it they created a system specifically des

Reducing cost is the first step to increasing care. If the care is unaffordable, it tends to not happen. Other countries with better life expectancy and quality of health care spend HALF what we spend in the U.S.

Other measures that reduce cost (but not provider earnings) include emphasis on generic and well proven drugs rather than the drug of the week, clinical diagnosis rather than a battery of tests, and same proces of medical supplies.

And in answer to your concerns, the GOP did fuck all. There are plenty of possibilities to improve the situation, but the GOP simply isn't open to those answers even though they work at least better than our system literally everywhere they have been implemented and at half the cost. It was GOP naysaying that kept the ACA from including those solutions in the first place. The situation isn't going to improve until the GOP either pull their heads out of their asses or get voted out. I'm fine with either.

If you look at the price of the surgery centers, they are certainly better, but they are still in the stratosphere. A lot of people simply can't afford them. Urgent care really can't do more than a family doctor. If it's anything really URGENT, they tell you to go to the ER, even though the ER will happily keep you waiting another 6 hours.

The ACA curbed some of the worst insurance company practices and mad it possible for former medical pariahs to get coverage, but the deductibles are killing some people s

This is the era of Trump. Public opinion doesn't matter. Truth doesn't matter.

It's an agenda.

I agree. It is eerily reminiscent of the era of Obama. I remember things like "if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor" and "the average American family will save $2500 per year in healthcare costs" and "you will have more and better choices for healthcare under the Affordable Care Act" and "we will cover more people with better coverage and it will cost less".

It turns out that every single one of those things was false, that millions of Americans were outraged at the effort to have government take over healthcare and that outrage fell on deaf ears. Remember the legislative chicanery to get the ACA rammed through the Senate before Senator Ted Kennedy's replacement, Republican Scott Brown, could be seated?

Sheesh. And liberals are upset when the Republicans do things along party lines without Democratic support.

The only hope is that it will be reversed, as soon as possible.

The same can be said of the Affordable Care Act, which is decidedly unaffordable for practically every American it affects.

Obama was hoping that the Americans would look to Canada and how our health care system does what he is quoted as saying.

We have some dual citizen families returning to Canada. Vis, Husband is American, wife Canadian. After 6 months of employment, the family is covered for medicare. No discussion about pre-existing conditions or limits to coverage.

Her 4 kids will be going to McGill University for around $3000/kid. University here is 3 years for a bachelor degree as first year is covered in a college that

It doesn't help much if major venues host his story without addressing its veracity. For instance, this bit about paid priority for those who need it. The key words are "paid" and "need"; these are markets not currently being singled out for this particular extortion, because of the law he intends to repeal. Of course this is hugely unfair as the telecom companies aren't allowed to perform the same type of extortion the pharmacological ones can.

So how does The People fight this? No one reads/.No one. Numbers-wise, I mean./. is not read by enough people to truly spark Fake (or Genuine) Internet Outrage.How come this isn't running front page on the major Muggle press?Yeah. What they don' know won't hurt them.But sure as fuck it'll hurt us.

There has been a ton of press coverage of this. The people who aren't listening is the FCC. Everyone else is! And there's a lot of loud bitching from every corner (except the ISPs of course.) There's a ton of noise that doing this is Bad. But as I said, FCC isn't listening. They just don't give a flying f about The People.

The Muggle Press misrepresents a lot of things here. They talk about ISPs being the issue, because that's easier for the audience to understand and relate to. In reality the problem is in the guts of the internet, where the big players control not only the internet but content as well. Sure, if your ISP happens to be Comcast, then yes, Comcast is trying to screw over the internet competition. But if your ISP is a local cable company, or a rural broadband company, they are going to be wanting net neutrali

Artificial scarcity is the core motivation behind the Network Neutrality repeal. They are about to roll out 5G technologies with 10gbs download speeds which is more bandwidth than most everyone will need. With cable cutters and plunging market prices the telecoms are in a panic and thus they are calling on their inside man to protect their interests. He is looking forward to his future “Pai Day” for his loyal service.

If network prioritization were a true problem then senders and receivers, the customers, should have full control of prioritization using existing Quality of Service (QoS) network features. However by giving telecoms unabated control of prioritization they can distort traffic and resume charging premiums for video and voice.

The FCC chairman has been unequivocally clear in is objectives; increased network investment (read profit) for the ILECs and absolute hands off regulation until there is a complete “market failure” (read unavoidable regulation due to universal outrage over telcom censorship and exorbitant prices).

Finally his talking point about regulatory burden on telcom technology is a joke. It is impossible for telcoms to transfer data beyond the speed of light so the only thing they can do is slow it down or block it. Providing financial incentives to enact artificial scarcity, censorship, and surveillance is the complete opposite of promoting “Free Market” ideologies.

However by giving telecoms unabated control of prioritization they can distort traffic and resume charging premiums for video and voice.

This is not just about multimedia. The telecoms want to tap into the endless V2X (Vehicle to X) traffic of the future and charge extra for mandatory traffic services that may not use the bandwidth but require very low latency. They want you to pay for gas, electricity and infrastructure data for every km/mile driven.

Pai doesn't care. All he has to do to get a cushy job later on is to say,"Well, we tried" to the telecom industry. If they get even a few bucks more out of this they'll hire him away into executive heaven after he leaves/is ousted. He's showing his loyalty to the bitter end and HE KNOWS this will never, ever get through. It's going to get sued into the turf 5 seconds after being enacted, and will probably die a long slow death in court.

Does ANYONE remember the Bushie administration? The same tactics were used! Do all kinds of things that will never work, but do enough of them and maybe a few will stick. When government fails to yield any benefit, turn around and tell your base,"Government doesn't work!" even though they've been intentionally obstructing the functioning of government and blame it on the next guy. Rinse and repeat!

I am really not too concerned about this because I am sure this will be challenged in a court. While the challenge is proceeding, plaintiffs can ask for an injunction. When 80+% of people support net neutrality, the court system should side with the people. Ajit Pai's actions really make me want to turn into a troll but I am holding it together.

Regulation is needed when there are severe problems in private market and these problems are not being solved for a prolonged period of time. CO2 emissions seems to be a good such example, and either carbon tax or cap and trade a reasonable response. Even phone number portability is arguably unnecessary. The same problem was being actively solved by services such as Google Voice and over the top apps. Arguably legislation suffocated these services and left us stuck with inconvinient phone numbers rather tha

Given a finite resource, once near capacity, paid prioritization is essentially the same as unpaid deprioritization. And there's limited reason to think that ISPs would not run everything near capacity, as we have ample evidence of this already.

In fact, there's a major financial benefit to them when net neutrality goes away to push ever closer to capacity. Every unpaid service that gets to "pay or die" status is a good one, because it either dies and frees up resources for y

Seems to be a common agreement among voters that it is perfectly fine to leave the sick and disabled to fend for themselves. Supposedly it is their fault for not having a rich daddy with a multi-million dollar real estate business or making a racket on Wall Street. There are plenty who fully agree with that approach and they will continue to vote for a party that promotes such ideas....with the expectation, of course, that when needed medical services will be available at little or no cost to them. If there

The ISPs have always had this ability and do so under NN too. Under NN, they arenâ(TM)t allowed to slow down ER1s medical data over ER2s medical data. They can still prioritize medical data, VoIP, VOD, etc over something like webpages, ftp, bittorent, telnet, etc. NN isnâ(TM)t against QoS.

Your entire post is a false dichotomy. It asserts that there are only without NN, more networks would exist. Simple facts show that is false. The FCC only put in place NN rules two years ago. So before these rules, many telco networks were created? Or have telco networks been shrinking down over the last decade with or without NN?

I read his argument as being that NN rules help entrench incumbents and prevent new entrants. So no, the fact that all new entrants were in place before the 2015 NN rules seems perfectly consistent with his argument. It doesn't really support his argument, either (hard to discern signal from noise in two years), but I guess I'm not seeing why you think it's a smoking gun in the other direction.

I read his argument as being that NN rules help entrench incumbents and prevent new entrants. So no, the fact that all new entrants were in place before the 2015 NN rules seems perfectly consistent with his argument. It doesn't really support his argument, either (hard to discern signal from noise in two years), but I guess I'm not seeing why you think it's a smoking gun in the other direction.

And in the many, many years before NN, hordes and multitudes of new ISPs were created every year? That's against basic facts that the number of ISPs have dwindled down to a handful before NN and continued to do so after NN. Or did NN have really no effect on the creation of ISPs before or after. That's like saying my Axe body cologne drove away supermodels considering I had 0 supermodel girlfriends before I used it and 0 after I used it.

Again false logic: I'm pretty if something does not change the numbers of ISPs before or after it's implementation for 2 WHOLE years, it had no real effect. My Axe body spray is definitely keeping away supermodels. It has no bearing to the fact I don't live or work anywhere near supermodels and can never meet them.

I'm pretty if something does not change the numbers of ISPs before or after it's implementation for 2 WHOLE years, it had no real effect.

I have no thoughts one way or the other on your looks, but hopefully they exceed your capacity for critical thinking. Two years might be long enough to make directional judgments about production rates of cat videos or mobile apps, but it's almost certainly not long enough to determine trends for high-inertia businesses like ISPs. Have a good weekend, friend.

Keeping NN now will result in network competition? The same competition that worked so well in the past?

It actually did work well in the past. I can remember when there were pages of ISPs to choose from. Now, you're extremely lucky if you have access to two. Net Neutrality has been under attack for well over a decade, eroding the internet.

That consolidation happened years before anyone ever coined the term net neutrality.

Well, of course you numpty. There was no need for the term "Net Neutrality" until what had been the status quo was under attack from telecoms.

But the concept of "net neutrality" goes back to before there was even an internet. Since you seem to be uninformed on this issue, let me give you some information, with citations you can follow if you want to learn more about this matter in-depth.

If you really believe that the US without NN will see more competition amongst carriers, you are bound for a bad surprise. Quite the opposite is to be expected: For a sizeable part of all customers, who today already have basically not more options than to contract with one locally available carrier to get (at least) the "whole Internet" experience, the number of options will decrease from 1 to zero - because especially where there are not multiple carriers already, there is no reason why the existing carri

Your comment is NOTHING but blatantly false statements. the NN regulations didn't require ANY paperwork and they only covered transport and source discrimination and not only that but they WAIVED even that if your company served less than 100K customers.

Even if they have no plans to offer service in some regions, they still don't want anyone else doing so either. Some state legislatures have forbidden municipal broadband at the request of giant telecoms.

WTF? There's no reason for an ISP to censor traffic. I'm on a rural wireless plan, in a country with net neutrality and much less populated then yours. It's really simple, I pay for so many GBs, 250 in my case and whether I use it all up at Netflix or streaming a video of a bird feeder or downloading Linux ISO files is none of my ISP's business. What is their business is if I use more then my allocation.That's all that is needed, sell packages of X GB rather then advertising unlimited when you can't deliver

Except it isn't at all a strawman. It's just devastating to your argument. The only reason an ISP might have to limit customer A's video download in order to provide customer B's physics video is if they deliberately sold more bandwidth than they actually had. That is, if they committed fraud.

Only if the customers freely choose to request that traffic. If, instead they choose distance learning, telework, security systems and other uses, that's what they will get. It isn't the ISPs call, it's the paying customers'.

Why the fuck wimp out, your country, your fucking network, grind on the fuckers until they wimp out. The ugly dumb bastard is the most hated troll on the entire internet and I mean globally. Pretty much has become the ultimate internet zero, a vacuum that draws hate and loathing from the entire public spectrum. You can bet they will stab him in the back because basically the scummy git's presence in anything is a massive negative, you could not employ, contract with or in any way associate with them, withou

Not true. No one ever had to prove their were net neutral. Instead the FCC (in the past) assumes they are until complaints arrive.

If the hypothetical requirement to prove you are net neutral before you can start a new network were true, then why is it that the largest companies are the ones who lobbied and paid to remove net neutrality while the small players are mostly all for net neutrality? If government requirements are burdensome, then those most burdened would have been the smallest players, whereas

Nobody is being paid under the table. That is not how the system works. The political donations by the telecoms to Republican politicians are perfectly legal and done openly... as are the media industry's donations to the Democrats.

FYI, I'm in Australia.

That explains your misunderstanding. In most countries corruption is illegal. In America, it is not.

There was a Web Comic I saw once, which sadly I lost the link for, where a lobbyist comes into a Congressman's office and asks to donate some money in order to pass a bill. Horrified, the Congressman says that's not how he operates and for the lobbyist to come back in and try again. This time, the lobbyist says he's really concerned about some issue and wants a bill passed. Also, in a completely unrelated matter, he wants to make a big donation to the Congressman. This time the Congressman is satisfied because it's not bribery this time. (I really wish I could find that web comic.)

Ha ha, no. In America it just isn't corruption [economist.com] if it isn't explicitly bribery with a clear quid pro quo agreement between the two parties. In America we have our own definitions for lots of words, some people call that "American exceptionalism."

it is fine, as the highly controversial Citizens United ruling said in 2010, for wealthy campaign contributors to expect that their dollars will buy “ingratiation or access” in governor’s mansions and statehouses

An appreciable amount of people believe in a magical skydaddy.A slight minority of Americans believe that Trump was the best choice for president.Even here on Slashdot where we hold ourselves as members of a generally more intelligent crowd we get people who believe the world is red or blue and don't actually analyse issued on their merits or refuse that both sides of politics are wrong.

What I'm saying is, people don't need to be paid under the table. Some people are genuinely stupid.